[PROJ] Future maintainance releases

[Greg Troxel]

Kristian Evers <kreve at sdfe.dk> writes:

> Greg, I am well aware of the intricacies of packaging systems. It is not simple
> and you and Bas have difficult task of making it all fit together. Please don’t
> think that I don’t understand or respect the job you do.

> I am also aware that PROJ has made a lot of changes over a somewhat short
> time. I would love to live in a world where that wasn’t necessary but unfortunately
> PROJ was in an less than ideal state for far too long. It is no ones fault, it is just
> the way things turned out. Now we are catching up and that means moving quickly
> for a bit. I think most agrees that this is the right thing to do. I also know that it is
> a difficult task to migrate from one API to the other. I believe the benefits of the
> new features in PROJ is worth it. I also think that PROJ 6 is a good bridge between
> the new and the old. I fully expect PROJ 6 to be around in packaging systems
> for quite some time still. But I also fear that most projects will be stuck using the
> old API forever if we keep hanging on to proj_api.h. Were that to happen I would
> be extremely discouraged from working on PROJ - my motivation is to bring
> better use of geodesy to the masses. We can’t do that properly through the old
> API.

Certainly I realize this is all very complicated with no 100% wonderful
approaches.

> I think what we have now is a good compromise: Those that can use PROJ 
> when it comes out and get the benefit of regular updates to the EPSG database
> etc. And those who can’t use PROJ 7 just yet can still use the 6.x branch which
> is already rather good. Should it prove necessary we will release maintenance
> releases of the 6.x branch, at least for the first year of it being superseded by
> PROJ 7.

I still am missing something.   When 7 comes out, with a packaging
system that has a single proj version, what version do you think that
should be?

Do you mean that by having 7 released, then there can be a year of
packaging sytems having 6, during which time upstreams of proj-using
packages can be pressured to make a formal release which is compatible
with proj 7?   In all seriousness, this might be the best that can be
realistically hoped for.